NORM PATTIS: Connecticut’s aversion to suicide deep-seated, will force you to live ‘every last agonizing second’

Here’s a game I like to play with prosecutors: I ask them to speak to their client, especially when plea bargaining fails, usually because the prosecutor insists that my client go to prison for far longer than my client is willing to consider. This usually produces a puzzled look.

“I don’t represent the victim in this case,” one prosecutor once said.

“The victim isn’t your client; besides, until there is a finding of guilt, there is no victim, only an accuser. I want to speak to your client.”

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“What are you talking about?” she said, looking suddenly confused, followed quickly by irritation.

“You make me a plea offer, and I am required to take it to my client and get his position. We just rejected your offer and made a counter-offer. I want you to discuss it with your client, and then tell me what your client thinks.” We were staring across a divide measured in years, the state wanting my client to agree to five years in prison; he was willing to give no more than two years.

“I ... I represent the community,” she stammered. “I speak for my client.”

“Really? You mean to say you just get to do what you think is right, and you are not accountable to anyone? If I substituted my judgment for my client’s, I’d be disbarred.”

The conversation ended at about this time. I’m told she threw her pen at the door as I closed it behind me, frustrated by her gibberish.

We don’t elect prosecutors in Connecticut and for good reason: Pandering to popular passion doesn’t yield measured judgment. But placing the lives of defendants in the hands of appointed prosecutors has risks all its own. To whom are prosecutors accountable?

I’ve stood next to any number of people in a courtroom. Each of them had a pulse, a voice, a set of discernable interests in the world that it was my duty to protect. The state, or, as it is referred to in the federal courts, the government, is never present. It is a bloodless, soulless abstraction, a necessary fiction that we rely upon to assure that live together is not reduced to chaos.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that because the state is a fiction, it does not exist. The state acts through agencies, officers and politicians — its influence is everywhere: It paves the roads on which we drive, funds the schools our children attend, and makes laws intended to protect and promote our health and welfare. But it is an entity of limited use, and there is plenty that it cannot do. It cannot, for example, create a living thing, although it can take lives, through execution, warfare or the exercise of its police power.

How much power should this soulless thing have over life and death?

The General Assembly is poised once again to consider legislation this term to make it possible for people to choose death with dignity. If the proposal becomes law — the muscles through which the state moves — physicians would be permitted to prescribe medication to end the lives of the terminally ill. Under current law, a physician who did such a thing could be prosecuted for murder, murder being, after all, nothing more than being possessed of the conscious objective to take a life, and then taking that life.

I can almost understand the sovereign’s decision to treat the citizenry as a perpetual income stream while we are alive and healthy; the tax code requires us to give a percentage of all we earn to the government, transforming the nation into a tax plantation. But what interest is served by the government’s decision to require that we live every last moment of life, regardless of the pain, psychological or physical?

The state’s aversion to suicide is deep-seated. Taking one’s own life is regarded as irrational, an act if not contrary to nature then against sound public policy. A person who is deemed in imminent risk of harm to himself or herself can be taken into psychiatric custody, held against their will, medicated, and restrained. The medical professions are prohibited from assisting in suicide. The state’s interest in life is treated as an absolute, to be honored in every case, regardless of the consequences.

I can imagine few things as terrifying as knowing that my life had entered its final stages, that increasingly unendurable suffering was my lot, and that the state would see to it that I live every last agonizing second. It seems sadistic, frankly. The state, this fiction that cannot give life, but which freely takes it when it so chooses, requiring me to live out such days as remain to me long after my interest in living has past, this state is a thing of horror.

A warm regard for individual dignity and autonomy requires that the state recognize the right to die with dignity. Safeguards can be built into such a law to prevent its abuse. We can require second opinions, even a waiting period between seeking death and the administration of lethal drugs. In cases where inappropriate familial influence may be suspected, or where a person’s capacity to choose death might be called into question, we can appoint a guardian.

Oregon and three other states have permitted residents the right to death with dignity. No parade of horribles has marched out of these states to suggest that death with dignity is dangerous. Just why we must ask the sovereign for permission to die on our own terms stuns me. The state, this bloodless fiction, is nowhere to be found. It cannot comfort me in my hour of need. Having to kiss the glove of its ministers for permission to die on my own terms is an insult too great be borne without contempt.

The sovereign did not summon me from nothing and grant me the breath of life. From ashes we come and to ashes we return. Begging a fiction for the right to pass from life to death is macabre. No just law gives to strangers the right to tell me I must suffer.

Connecticut residents should be permitted to chose death with dignity; a sovereign that refuses this deserves only scorn.

Norm Pattis, a criminal defense and civil rights lawyer with offices in Bethany and New Haven, blogs at www.pattisblog.com. He is also the author of “Taking Back the Courts” and “Juries and Justice.” Email norm@normpattis.com.